Daiei Co. Ltd. [1997] 111′
country: Japan
director: KIYOSHI KUROSAWA
cast: KOJI YAKUSHO, MASATO HAGIWARA,
cast: TSUYOSHI UJIKU, ANNA NAKAGAWA
A middle aged businessman removes a length of lead piping from a tunnel. Later that day he meets with a prostitute in an average motel room and, without warning, clubs her to death with the piping. So begins the inimitable film experience that is CURE.
One who desires to be on the cutting edge of cinema need not look further than the Japanese indie film movement over the past 10 years or so – directors like Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike, and Takashi Shimizu have brought the Japanese horror genre – now affectionately referred to as J-Horror – an entirely new sense of respect throughout the world. With CURE, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has taken the genre that these men helped to popularize and utterly revolutionized it – his revolution would reach near perfection by the time of his apocalyptic film KAIRO [2001].
Though Kurosawa’s film output had been quite prolific in the fourteen years leading up to CURE – he averaged three films a year – the international film community had taken little notice of him. Involved primarily with low budget softcore porn and other films that were meant to earn the majority of their revenue on video release, much of Kurosawa’s work from 1983 through 1996 went (and still goes) generally unnoticed. Hints of the greatness he would achieve later in his career are peppered throughout his earlier films, however – often quite liberally.
KANDAGAWA WARS (KANDAGAWA INRAN SENSO; 1983), his debut film, was an intelligent softcore pornography feature that payed homage to such directors as Hitchcock, Godard and Ford and played with its viewers moral sensibilities. Kurosawa’s early film career helped to solidify his methods for incorporating socially prevalent topics into his films and continued his trend of paying homage to those directors who influenced him. Two prime examples of the latter are the destruction of the tree in CHARISMA [1999] – accomplished by shooting a compressed air tank stuck in one of the tree’s hollows – and in the climax to DOPPELGANGER [2003] – in which one of the characters is chased down a staircase by an enormous ball.
It was the release of CURE that finally garnered Kurosawa international acclaim – unnerving, engrossing, and existentially charged, it took inspiration from crime thrillers through the ages and still managed to be like nothing seen before it. The film was nominated for – and won – numerous awards at domestic film festivals and, by 1998, was making rounds and spellbinding audiences around the world. Since then its popularity has only been growing – stateside this is due largely to a theatrical release in 2001 and subsequent release of the film on DVD. Though hardly light viewing, CURE has proven to be more accessible than much of Kurosawa’s other recent films – CHARISMA [1999] and AKARUI MIRAI [2003] particularly – and is second only to his later film KAIRO in terms of its current popularity.
Detective Takebe (Yakusho) is in charge of investigating a spate of unusual murders – including the one mentioned at the head of this review. All of the victims carry the same unusual MO – a large ‘X’ carved from their jaw to their breastbone. While logic would dictate that the murders were all perpetrated by either the same individual, or at the very least a group of like minded individuals, every case has a different suspect. To make matters worse, each of the suspects is entirely unrelated to the others in any way – this leaves the motivation behind the killings a complete mystery. Takebe’s friend and coworker Sakuma, a psychologist, offers up his own unsatisfying explanation: “The devil made them do it.”
Meanwhile, a drifter and amnesiac stumbles upon a relaxing grade school teacher at Shirasato Beach – his only identifying feature is the name “Mamiya” scrawled on the tag of his coat. The school teacher takes him in for the night and attempts with a great deal of futility to find out who he is and where he came from. Things soon take a turn for the bizarre, however, when Mamiya makes note of the pink negligee the school teacher’s wife is wearing. While a simple enough observation in and of itself, Mamiya has never seen the woman. “I don’t remember anything. You do,” is his brief explanation to the school teacher just before he lights a cigarette.
Takebe returns home after picking up his dry cleaning to the sound of his dryer spinning without anything inside of it. It becomes obvious quite quickly that he is unsatisfied with the state of his home life – his wife, Fumie, is mentally ill and incapable of working outside the home. The detective makes a futile attempt at bettering the situation by offering to take Fumie on a trip after the case is solved. Fumie agrees in the end and leaves Takebe to his late dinner. Not long afterwards the sound of the dryer, which Takebe stopped when he entered his house, begins again.
The next morning the school teacher attempts suicide by leaping from a second story window – in his bedroom, the sheets are covered in blood and feathers. The amnesiac is nowhere to be found. Takebe and Sakuma head to the hospital where the school teacher is being held to interrogate him. The man is incapable of remembering any motivations for the attack and just before going into hysterics over the realization that he had, indeed, killed his wife he gives the inspector another vague hint to the nature of the crimes being committed: “At the time it just seemed the natural thing to do.”
Takebe and Sakuma discuss possible psychological causes for the crimes, but Sakuma warns that no one can ever truly understand what motivates a criminal – sometimes not even the criminals. Takebe goes back to the scenes of the various crimes and retraces the suspects’ steps in a failed attempt to find out what they were thinking. The only insight he receives is from a flickering florescent light above the spot where the pipe used in the film’s initial murder was taken. In the meanwhile the amnesiac reappears – this time in Tokyo. In his wake two more entirely sane human beings are momentarily transformed into monsters – the policeman who first happens upon him and a doctor he meets later on. The policeman later recounts the same troubled statement as the school teacher – “At the time it seemed the natural thing to do.”
Finally having a solid trail to follow, Takebe catches up with the amnesiac and brings him into custody. Over the course of several days his professional interest in the case becomes an obsession – his work and home lives begin to tear at one another as a psychological battle between the amnesiac and himself begins and the true Takebe begins to show. In the end we are left wondering whether or not anyone is really aware of who they are and, more importantly, if we’re not all capable of the monstrous acts depicted.
Kurosawa’s CURE offers no easy explanations for what goes on within it with the director posing a number of questions and answering almost none of them. The disturbing character, Mamiya (played incredibly by Masato Hagiwara), has no identity of his own save for what Takebe and Sakuma (former pop star Tsuyoshi Ujiku) manage to dig up through the course of the film. As he explains to the female doctor, “All of the things that used to be inside of me… now they’re all outside. So I can see everything that’s inside of you.” It becomes evident that, even though its a well documented fact that people cannot be hypnotized into doing things against their will, Mamiya is somehow tapping into the inner violent tendencies of those people he comes into contact with – tendencies typically suppressed by a common social sense of morality. Having removed the moral barrier preventing such things it becomes possible for his victims (for lack of a better word) to commit violent crimes as though they were as natural as eating… drinking… sleeping.
CURE takes considerable time with its subject matter and considerable care in revealing its characters – Takebe’s transformation takes nearly the entire running time and, in the end, viewers are still left unsure of where he stands. The director leaves us with an abrupt ending that lets us know only one thing – the cycle of violence Mamiya caused and, possibly began, has not stopped simply because Mamiya himself has been. There is no happy ending and no one, audience included, gets off easy. By the end of its running time CURE has transcended the tried and tired genre to which it owes its inspiration and become an unsettling rumination on the very nature of self.
This film is truly a directorial tour de force on the part of Kurosawa. His unique use of sound is particularly of note – CURE is sparse of music and when tracks are present they tend to be very much subdued and are generally experienced as opposed to being heard. Propagating in the background for the duration of the film are a variety of low hums that, while not distracting in the least, tend to keep the viewer on edge. Also of note is the editing for the film – it is often jarring, particularly during the latter half of the film, but always seems to fit. The structure of the film, as is the case with many of Kurosawa’s films, is also something of a change. Western audiences, specifically, will notice that the film doesn’t follow any set linear progression and that the story unfolds in an unusual but entirely organic fashion.
Permeating the film, also, is a keen sense of reality. The lack of any sets to speak of and the enormous amount of on-location shooting ensures that the audience is consistently aware that the places where the film takes place are entirely real and not just created in preparation for it. This sense of reality dominates the film even when the events on screen are set firmly in unreality. This is extremely important given the film’s slight paranormal bent and makes the few scenes where things unexplainable by natural laws take place seem just as possible as everything else that happens throughout.
Much ado has been made by critics of Kurosawa and his work in regards to the nature of his characters. Acting tends to be consistently understated and characters are usually vaguely defined, if at all. There are no obvious heroes or villains and everyone on screen is entirely human. I can see this being an issue for some, especially audiences in the United States for whom characters are typically well drawn and their natures easy to deduce. Kurosawa takes no such short cuts and his films require an amount of work on the part of their viewers to be truly worthwhile – making them more art than entertainment.
Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho is in top form for this film – though I think the standout performance of his entire career may be in the film DOPPELGANGER, in which he spends much of the time playing two sides of the same character before they eventually coalesce into the same person. His portrayal of Takebe, struggling with an unhappy home life and a job that keeps him from experiencing it, is nothing short of brilliant. Much like Kurosawa, Yakusho was underused and under appreciated until 1997 when he was cast as the lead for both this film and Shohei Imamura’s triumphant return to cinema – UNAGI [1997]. Also of special note is Masato Hagiwara. As the amnesiac Mamiya he manages to be wholly unassuming yet wholly disturbing throughout. The very nature of his character is unsettling as he doesn’t commit murders himself – instead he awakens that murderous tendency in all he meets: From the policeman who hates his coworker to the female doctor who was disgraced in her male dominated medical school. The rest of the main cast of characters – Tsuyoshi Ujiku as Sakuma the psychologist and Anna Nakagawa as Takebe’s mentally unstable wife Fumie – also pull their roles off without a hitch.
In the end, CURE is one of the most satisfying films I’ve seen in recent years – even if it takes an amount of work to truly appreciate it. While it’s a shame that it took as long as it did for Kurosawa to gain international notoriety the film that finally garnered it for him is truly deserving. This one comes highly recommended and is, in my opinion, the best place to start if you desire to get into Kurosawa films.
